DIME NOVELS

The subject of scorn by moralists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, "dime novel" was originally a brand name, but as has often been true of trademarks in America, it became a generic term and was soon applied to any work of sensational fiction despite the cover price. The publisher Irwin P. Beadle & Co. named its series of inexpensive storybooks Beadle's Dime Novels, and the name stuck. Beadle's first novel, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) by Ann Sophia Stephens (1813–1886), established early in the popular mind the western frontier of the United States as the paradigmatic theme of the dime novel despite the fact that the books covered a multitude of themes: mystery and detective stories, school and sports stories, comic stories, sea stories (including pirates), love stories (a very popular category), and science fiction (principally stories of boy inventors). There were also stories of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and of slaves as in Metta Victor's Maum Guinea and Her Plantation "Children" (1861), which sold more than 100,000 copies in short order and was translated into several languages. Abraham Lincoln pronounced it "as absorbing as Uncle Tom's Cabin" (Harvey, p. 39). For many readers the best of the dime novels were the first ones, those published by Beadle & Co. and its successor, Beadle & Adams, and they sold by the millions.

With such success competition is never far behind. A former employee at Beadle, George Munro, along with his brother Norman L. Munro, the sensational Frank Tousey, and Street & Smith, soon joined Beadle as major publishers of dime novels. The early books were small sextodecimo volumes of a hundred or so pages and emphasized recurring authors over continuing characters. In the 1870s the ten-cent and five-cent weeklies introduced the concept of continuing characters with the stories of Dick Talbot, Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, and others. When mystery and detective stories became popular, the recurring heroes included Old Sleuth, Old Cap. Collier, Old King Brady, Joe Phenix, and the incomparable Nick Carter.

At first the readership consisted of adults, but by the 1870s publications designed to appeal to younger readers, primarily male, were common and story papers such as Frank Tousey's Boys of New York and Norman L. Munro's Golden Hours published serials and short stories specifically for the youth market. The five-cent weeklies were either anthologies of stories in various categories (travel and exploration, frontier and western, mystery and detective) or contained the continuing adventures of an individual hero as in the weekly Diamond Dick Library.

Public reaction to dime novels was mixed. Early critics welcomed the concept behind Beadle's "dollar book for a dime" (see Johannsen 1:31), which placed literature within the reach of the poorest reader and thus encouraged reading. Later critics might question the amount of violence but seldom the language; curses in the text were often represented by dashes. Some critics blamed the dime novel for leading boys astray, the same criticism that was leveled at movies, radio, and comic books during a later generation. When the dime novels and story papers ceased publication around 1915, nostalgia replaced criticism and collectors prized copies rescued from the trash. In 1922 the New York Public Library mounted an exhibit of dime novels, primarily Beadles from the collection given to the institution by Dr. Frank P. O'Brien. The dime novel has long been the subject of scholarly attention.

FRONTIER AND WESTERN STORIES

According to Daryl Jones in The Dime Novel Western (1978), there were six basic heroes: the backwoodsman, the miner, the outlaw, the plainsman, the cowboy, and the rancher. Many figures in the dime novel western belonged to more than one category. The backwoodsman served as guide to parties traveling through the new country in emulation of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking. Edward S. Ellis's Seth Jones (in the 1860 novel Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier) established the formula within the dime novel. Oll Coomes's Old Kit Bandy was a variant of the type, serving as both guide and comic relief. So popular was Deadwood Dick between 1877 and 1885, the year his creator Edward L. Wheeler died, that the publisher created a successor, Deadwood Dick Jr. (no blood relative). The writer of most of the new stories was Jesse C. Cowdrick, author of the Broadway Billy stories, who used Wheeler's name as a pseudonym. Deadwood Dick had no basis in fact, despite claims put forth to identify any number of individuals as the original of the character, while Calamity Jane, his companion in adventure, bore no resemblance to the historical figure either in appearance or in characteristics. They were creatures of the imagination.

Buffalo Bill, on the other hand, had a factual basis in William F. Cody (1846–1917), though the dime novel character was a romanticized version of the scout and showman of history. He was introduced to the public in 1869 by Edward Zane Carroll Judson (1823–1886, better known by his pen name Ned Buntline) in the serial Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men in Street & Smith's New York Weekly. Despite writing two more Buffalo Bill serials for Street & Smith, inserting the character as a secondary figure in a third serial, and writing a stage play, Scouts of the Prairies (1872), Buntline wrote only one additional story about the scout, a serial for Beadle & Adams in 1885. Apparently not interested in maintaining the franchise, Buntline stepped aside and allowed Colonel Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904) to continue the presentation of Cody's adventures to an eager public. When Ingraham died in 1904, having written eighty Buffalo Bill stories for Beadle & Adams and forty-eight for Street & Smith, other writers provided new stories until 1912. As portrayed by Buntline, Buffalo Bill was part backwoodsman, part prospector, and part plainsman with a bit of Native American as far as his skill at following a trail was concerned. Little in the dime novels was based on anything Buffalo Bill accomplished in real life; rather his exploits were what the public expected of such a legendary figure. When Buffalo Bill established his Wild West Show in the 1880s the blend of fact and fiction was complete. His costume in the arena and his costume in the cover illustrations became the same.

Albert W. Aiken's Dick Talbot preceded Deadwood Dick in print by six years and combined the abilities of the gambler, the road agent, and the miner with those of the rancher. In addition Talbot had the traditional mysterious past (which he had left behind him in the east) of many dime novel heroes. A recurring theme in the series was Talbot's wooing, winning, and losing (sometimes to death) many a young lady, a condition of which he is painfully aware. Richard Wade, frontier lawman, miner, and cowboy hero, was better known as Diamond Dick from the sparkling diamonds that decorated his clothes and the diamond sights on his revolvers. The identification with the miner came from the silver mine he inherited. He was based in part on the medicine show entertainer George McClellan, nicknamed "Diamond Dick." Wade was unique among dime novel heroes in having a son, Bertie, a blood relation, who traveled with him. Eventually the elder Wade retired and his son, known as Diamond Dick Jr., carried on the tradition of righting wrongs throughout the West. Other western heroes, such as Ted Strong and Young Wild West, fit the model of heroes as cowboys and ranchers and operated in the twentieth century driving vintage automobiles and riding horses. Young Wild West ended his adventurous career on the battlefields of Europe in the First World War.

MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE STORIES

Where the dime novel western borrowed characters and themes from Cooper, the detective story drew on the recorded exploits of the legendary Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) and the men of his detective agency. The earliest detective serial in a story paper was probably the novelized version of Tom Taylor's play The Ticket of Leave Man, which appeared in the weekly Flag of Our Union in 1865. This was followed by Kenward Philp's "The Bowery Detective" in the New York Fireside Companion in 1870. But the first detective hero to appear in a series of stories was Old Sleuth, the creation of Harlan Page Halsey, in the same story paper two years later in 1872. In time the stories were signed by Old Sleuth as well, so there was an instant recognition that they were detective stories. In the first Old Sleuth story, the hero was a young man masquerading as an older one, a convention that was not maintained. A decade later the first publication specializing in detective fiction appeared, Norman Munro's Old Cap. Collier Library (1883), followed a few weeks later by Frank Tousey's New York Detective Library. Both were anthologies of stories about a variety of detectives. The first weekly publication to feature the continuing adventures of a single detective was the Nick Carter Library, which began in 1891.

The Pinkerton model for the detective was a man or woman who was the best in his or her profession, one to whom the official police could turn in time of crisis. He or she borrowed the skills of the hunter when tracking a suspect and thus was little different from the heroes of Cooper. Questioning the client and various suspects was accompanied by a visit to the scene of the crime. The detective was often layers deep in disguise and solved crimes as much by diligent eavesdropping incognito as by scientific deduction. The type of crime varied, though murder was prominent. While readers were allowed to observe the detective at work, there was little opportunity to match wits with the detective. The solution often depended on the detective gaining an understanding of the histories of the characters (victim and suspects), and in this the works of French novelist Émile Gaboriau (1832–1873) served as models. After the Sherlock Holmes stories became popular in 1891, many writers emulated them.

Traditionally the dime novel detective was old and wise and the name sometimes reflected this, often with tongue in cheek: Old Search, Old Hawkeye, Old Neverfail, Old Bull's Eye, Old Spicer. In addition there were a number of women detectives, some of whom served as assistants to the hero (e.g., Ida Jones in the Nick Carter stories), others who worked on their own (e.g., Lady Kate Edwards in the Old Sleuth Library). The geriatric sleuth was eventually replaced by a series of younger men who were the equal of any predecessors. Nick Carter led the way as a youthful man in charge of an agency of sleuths with whom the boy readers could more readily identify and who solved mysteries for kings and presidents in a manner that was the envy of his readers. He competed with, but did not entirely replace, the western hero in the marketplace.

SCHOOL AND SPORTS STORIES

The boarding school story made famous in England by Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857) was represented in the dime novels largely by stories reprinted from British sources. The Jack Harkaway series by Bracebridge Hemyng that began as stories set in a British boarding school continued as accounts of Harkaway's globetrotting adventures. The majority of the sports stories in dime novels were set in boarding schools or colleges and universities with the sport taking precedence over academic studies. The greatest and most popular school and sports hero was Frank Merriwell of Yale, the creation of Gilbert Patten writing as Burt L. Standish. With his skill at saving damsels in distress (one of whom he eventually married), winning at every sport he played, traveling to the far corners of the world, and gathering around him a coterie of friends who would die for him, he was indeed the idol of American youth. Beginning in 1896, Merriwell's regular adventures in Street & Smith's Tip Top Weekly were the staple of many a boy's library. The stories were kept in print for four decades. Merriwell had many imitators (Jack Lightfoot, Frank Manley, Fred Fearnot, Jack Standfast) but no equals.

SCIENCE FICTION

While a variety of stories could be called prototypes of science fiction, most involved some form of exotic travel by means of hot air balloon or fast land craft, in emulation of Jules Verne. Frank Tousey had a monopoly on these in the stories of the boy inventors Frank Reade Jr. and Jack Wright who filled the skies with imaginative airships and the seas with fantastic submersibles. The majority of the stories in both series was the work of one man, Luis Senarens (1865–1939), writing under the unimaginative pseudonym "Noname." The Frank Reade and Jack Wright stories began appearing in the 1870s in the story papers and were collected in the five-cent weeklies before disappearing from the newsstands in the onslaught of the new pulp magazines.

THE CRITICS AND THE END OF AN ERA

Dime novel publishers succeeded by utilizing the latest technology in papermaking, printing, and distribution to supply a newly literate market with inexpensive reading matter. Early criticism of dime novels usually came in the form of editorials that derided them as so much immoral sensationalism or blamed juvenile delinquency on the reading of cheap fiction. One famous case in 1874 involved Jesse Pomeroy, a fourteen-year-old who murdered two children. According to Edmund Pearson in Dime Novels (p. 93) the prosecution suggested he might have been led to his crimes by the reading of "cheap 'literature of the dime novel type.'" But Pomeroy denied ever having read a dime novel in his life. There were a number of rebuttals to these attacks. Beadle & Adams produced several editorials in defense of dime novels in the pages of their Saturday Journal and Banner Weekly. They even published a list of the guidelines they provided their authors in which (among other stipulations) they prohibited anything "offensive to good taste" (Pearson, p. 96). After an 1884 editorial in the New York Tribune which claimed boys were encouraged to run away to the Wild West by reading dime novels, Captain Frederick Whittaker, a dime novelist of long standing, wrote an extensive defense of the books. Prentiss Ingraham weighed in on two fronts, a letter to the Mobile Sunday Times in 1888 and a footnote in one of his "Dick Doom" stories for Beadle's Half-Dime Library in 1892 in which he denied the allegations that dime novel writers encouraged boys to leave home.

In the early twentieth century it was a combination of the pulp magazines and the movies that spelled the end of the dime novel. The same price once paid for the dime novel could buy more reading material in the pulp magazine or a vivid adventure on the silver screen. Readers in the 1920s looked back at the dime novels of their youth with nostalgia, remembering the way the slim books had fueled their imaginations, and they built collections of their childhood favorites. As Charles M. Harvey says in his essay for the Atlantic Monthly, "How those heroes and heroines and their allies, their enemies and their doings, cling to the memory across the gulf of years!" (p. 37) The value of the dime novels for later generations is as social history, collections of attitudes and beliefs from a period in American history when the hero always won and the villain received his comeuppance in the last chapter.

See alsoBook Publishing; Mystery and Detective Fiction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Author of "Old Cap. Collier" [William I. James]. "The Seaside Detective; or, Ironclad in the Employ of the Government." Old Cap. Collier Library 4 (12 May 1883).

Buntline, Ned [Edward Zane Carroll Judson]. "Buffalo Bill's Best Shot." Log Cabin Library 127 (20 August 1891).

A Celebrated Author [Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey]. "Nick Carter, Detective. The Solution of a Remarkable Case." Nick Carter Detective Library 1 (8 August 1891).

Moore, Harry [Stephen Angus Douglas Cox]. "The Liberty Boys of ''76'; or, Fighting for Freedom." Liberty Boys of "'76" 1 (4 January 1901).

A New York Detective [Francis W. Doughty]. "Old King Brady, the Sleuth-Hound." New York Detective Library 154 (14 November 1885).

"Noname" [Luis P. Senarens]. "Frank Reade, Jr., and His Queen Clipper of the Clouds. A Thrilling Story of a Wonderful Voyage in the Air." Wide Awake Library 993–994 (1–4 October 1890).

An Old Scout [Cornelius Shea]. "Young Wild West, the Prince of the Saddle." Wild West Weekly 1 (24 October 1902).

Old Sleuth [Harlan Page Halsey]. "Old Sleuth, the Detective; or, The Bay Ridge Mystery." Old Sleuth Library 1 (3 March 1885).

Standish, Burt L. [Gilbert Patten]. "Frank Merriwell at Yale; or, Freshman against Freshman." Tip Top Weekly 40 (16 January 1897).

Wheeler, Edward L. "Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills." Beadle's Half-Dime Library 1 (15 October 1877).

Secondary Works

Cox, J. Randolph. The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Curti, Merle. "Dime Novels and the American Tradition." Yale Review 26 (1937): 761–778.

Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. New York: Verso, 1987. Revised edition, 1998.

Harvey, Charles M. "The Dime Novel in American Life." Atlantic Monthly 100 (July 1907): 37–45.

Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature. 3 vols. Illustrated. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950–1962. The Multimedia Digitization Lab at the Northern Illinois University Libraries in DeKalb has much of Johannsen's text online at http://www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/bibindex.html. The website includes additional material such as cover art and full texts of numerous dime novels.

Jones, Daryl. The Dime Novel Western. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, Bowling Green State University, 1978.

Noel, Mary. Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Pearson, Edmund. Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1929.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Stern, Madeleine B., ed. Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

Sullivan, Larry E., and Lydia Cushman Schurman, eds. Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks. New York: Haworth Press, 1996.

Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. 4 vols. New York: Bowker, 1972–1981. Volume 1, The Creation of an Industry, 1630–1865, and volume 2, The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919, are especially pertinent to the present essay.

J. Randolph Cox